Essay 2000

Insight

An essay written by Christine Lemke Matwey
on October 2000

The girl in the orange twinset carefully sips her instant coffee. (Does she play the cello? Harp? At any rate, some instrument which requires unbelievably beautiful hands.) She sighs - 50 years, half a century, phew, how does that sound? She's silent for a while, gazing into space across tangerine skins and peanut shells, bits of crumpled paper and partially stubbed-out cigarette ends. She frowns. That stuff in the brown plastic cup is really hot, and it doesn't taste too good, either. Luckily, the porter now waves to her from behind his desk and pulls a face which only she understands. She laughs and gestures to him, "not now. later". Usually, humorous banter would ensue, because Freddy the porter, caretaker of rooms and keys, loves to chat with "his" students.

But now's not the time. She takes a deep breath - 50 years, that sounds like a lifetime, or rather like three worlds at once. But before we can ask her to elaborate, she jumps up, muttering something about her lesson, smiling shyly - and then she's gone.

An orange twinset amidst a wintry profusion of dark-coloured instrument cases and long scarves. Will she take the lift, which bears nostalgic witness to its East German manufacturer yet nevertheless manages to rumble its way to the fifth of seven floors? Or will she climb the stairs, past Fritz Cremer's bust of Eisler and through the small glass-roofed passage? On 6th July, 1998, Hanns Eisler's 100th birthday, students are said to have poured a full glass of champagne over his bronze head. No doubt Eisler would have licked his lips in glee - a stockily-built man, it was said of him that he always smoked too much, drank too much and ate too many sweets. Wolf Biermann, the German singer-songwriter and former student of Eisler's, called out during a recent poetry reading, "What a man! And such a prudent, caring teacher!".

The centre of the New Berlin is a vibrant, ultra-desirable location in which to teach an study music (or conducting, opera directing, composition or cultural management). For the Academy of Music Hanns Eisler (HfM) on Charlottenstraße marks more or less "the heart within the heart" of the German capital. The Academy almost nestles against the Konzerthaus opposite, the former Schauspielhaus where in 1824 Carl-Maria von Weber's romantic opera "Der Freischütz" was first performed and which is now home to the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. To either side of the Konzerthaus the Academy looks out over the Gendarmenmarkt, a square rich in tradition, with the German Cathedral to the right and the French Cathedral to the left. Next door, at Number 56, is the well-known Berlin wine restaurant Lutter & Wegner, with its tempting menu of traditional German dishes and its exquisite wine list. The writer E.T.A. Hoffmann lived here on the second floor between 1815 and 1822, and the composer Jacques Offenbach immortalised him, along with the entire location, in his opera "The Tales of Hoffmann".

So is Berlin's Charlottenstraße no more than an ivory tower of artistic activity? Certainly not! To the rear of the Academy, life in the 21st century has begun with a vengeance on the legendary Friedrichstraße, that glorious boulevard of the 1920s. When the French department store Galéries Lafayettes was built here, its architect Jean Nouvel declared that Paris is everywhere (so why not in Berlin, too?). And even the exclusive boutiques, cafés, bars and galleries lining the street are imposing in their architectural design. Berlin has lofty ambitions, particularly in its old, new, Prussian centre. Is this the spirit of the times, to be flamboyant, conjuring up the glory of the past, no matter what the cost?

Getting back to Charlottenstraße, however, the main cause of it all, objectively speaking, was the Cold War, the time after the founding of two German states, because without it, Berlin would never have had two music academies. Opened on October 1st, 1950, in Wilhelmstraße 53, the Deutsche Hochschule für Musik Berlin (the German Academy of Music Berlin, as it was then called) saw itself from the very first as an antidote to the Academy of Music on Fasanenstraße (known since 1975 as Berlin's University of the Arts, the Universität der Künste, or UdK), which had remained within the British sector of the divided town - a red gauntlet turned institution, if you like, a courageous step in the opposite direction. The very first Director, the internationally renowned musicologist Georg Knepler, wanted to educate "a new type of highly-qualified musician", "musicians for the masses".

The aim was to encourage and to nurture not the self-centred genius who follows his inner calling, but rather the artist as helper and therapist, herald of a more just world, even political evangelist. This brings us back to Hanns Eisler, whose name the Academy has borne since 1964. Eisler - the fighter in the class struggle; Eisler - the emigrant twice over (in 1933 from Nazi Germany and in 1948 from the America of the McCarthy era); Eisler - the notorious composer of "Auferstanden aus Ruinen" (Risen from Ruins), to a text by Johannes R. Becher, which later became the national anthem of the GDR. Eisler's notorious quarrel with his teacher, Arnold Schönberg, was mutual. In a letter from Los Angeles on December 18th, 1947, Schönberg (by this time spelling his name Schoenberg) wrote, "It really is too stupid that grown men, musicians an artists who really should have better things to say, are letting themselves get mixed up in the theories about improving the world... If I had my way I would put him (Eisler) over my knee, give him a good thrashing and make him promise to keep his mouth shut and concentrate on writing music.

That's what he's good at, and he should leave the rest to others. If he wants to appear important, he should write important music." Not that Eisler didn't take the latter piece of advice to heart. His Tucholsky songs, the Serious Songs and in particular the German Symphony, first performed in Berlin in 1959, are powerful evidence of that. Eisler's late reconciliation with Schönberg met with little understanding in the fist German socialist state, and the fierce ideological debate over his opera "Faustus" forced him to retreat inwardly. In 1952 the composer admitted, "I have come to the painful realisation that I have to break with every convention, even the modernistic." In the end there was hardly any music written for "Faustus". The last photographs show Eisler, the privileged world traveller, in Salzburg, Vienna or Florence - a rotund little man, burying his very solemn features beneath wide-brimmed hats.